Saturday, March 28, 2015

Small and Simple solutions, Observe and Interact... I call it Iterative Development

A lot of people are perfectionists. They don't like to show other people their things until they are perfect.

But Gardening is Art. The ever striving towards a perfection even if it is forever unreachable.

And the especially cool thing with a Garden as Art is that it is living thing, it constantly grows and is never finished which means you Can keep getting closer to perfection. You don't need to put that final layer of varnish on before the gallery exhibit.

One year it has some weeds you thin out. Then you plant a tree. Then later add some ground cover and mid story shrubs. Then a fence. Then you plant some more flowers. Year after year of improvements.

You don't always know what works. Thus the permaculture principal of 'observe and interact'.
On top of the hill with the lovely view might seem a good place to put a building but then later you observe the high winds.

In software engineering it is called iterative development. Make it work. then come back and add features or make it more stable or easier to maintain.

You don't always have the time, resources or knowledge to make something perfect the first time.

Plus in a garden most people who see it, certainly Permies, understand this and can see the potential and where it is going. A garden is a multi-year project. Even with a budget of thousands and professional landscapers, let alone when you're alone making it out of found materials.

I love seeing gardens at various stages. From the bare landscape, to initial sketched out ideas, earthworks, a few years of development, to a mature developed space and gardens decades, even hundreds of years old passed down families or groundskeepers.